Cemeteries valuable historic resource
In the coming days, local resident Jim Wilm will join his fellow members from the Saskatchewan Genealogical Society (SGS) in Prince Albert’s Memorial Gardens to “read the cemetery.”
“We’ll work in pairs and check the gravestone information against the current records and add new gravestone information and take photos,” Wilm said.
According to the society’s website, the SGS Burial Index contains over 500,000 records of individuals buried in cemeteries or burial sites in 299 rural municipalities in the province. Wilm said he got involved with the program to preserve records as a matter of community pride.
“We want to encourage other communities to look after their cemeteries. Some of them have been overgrown or vandalized or damaged and we want the communities to maintain them,” he said. “They are the historical remembrance of those people who lived there and unless we look after them…they won’t be around.”